A woman who confessed to undercover police officers she had killed her boyfriend in 2020 and led them to various Nanaimo locations where she scattered his dismembered remains became uncharacteristically quiet about her ex during a police interview more than a year later, her trial heard on Wednesday.
Paris Laroche, 28, is standing trial for first-degree murder and interference of human remains in the killing of Sidney Mantee, 32.
The first part of her videotaped nine-hour police interview in Nanaimo after her arrest on May 27, 2021 was played at trial in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.
The video shows Laroche in a white T-shirt and dark pants sitting close to the side of a large upholstered armchair across from Sgt. Tiffany Isenor, who’s leaning back comfortably on a couch.
The conversation starts with the two chatting in a friendly way about coconut oil, essential oils, making lip balm, their mutual love of cats, eating addictions, natural cures for menstrual cramps, their separate connections to spirituality, and Laroche’s lunch order of roasted chicken, salad and Oreos.
When asked about her two cats, Laroche gives explicit instructions on their care and feeding and then OK’s having the SPCA care for them until she is released because “I have no one I can rely on.”
Laroche talks expansively about a number of her interests, including New Age chakras, crystals, vitamin D from the sun, amethysts, witchcraft, nature, paddle boarding, deer, traditional Chinese medicine and astrology.
Isenor throughout the first four hours of the interview asks Laroche a number of questions, such as whether she considers herself introverted or extroverted (she says both), if she is a hunter (wants to be), where she worked (fisheries and a New Age shop) and whether she went to school or plans to (wants to pursue something nature-oriented, like biologist or ornithologist).
Laroche is also asked where she sees herself in five years (living in a cabin in the woods), what her favourite moments of her life are (doesn’t have one), and what her drug of choice is (cannabis, mushrooms, tobacco and alcohol).
She shares that her parents ran a janitorial company, that she has a much younger sister who she isn’t close with, and that she doesn’t want kids.
Isenor asks about her close friends. One of them, Robyn Bartle, previously testified in court that she reported Laroche’s confession to police.
Then, about four hours in, they get into Laroche’s relationships. She says she has had three: in Grade 7, Grade 11 and a five-year relationship with Mantee.
She begins to answer in short or one-word sentences and says she’d rather not talk about details. But she does tell Isenor they met working in fisheries, she thought she was in love, and it was her first love.
The relationship lasted five years, she continued, and ended gradually. She describes how he came from an abusive background and how that affected her and the relationship.
About a month before the interview, Laroche was befriended by two officers posing as father and son who told her they were looking for Mantee to kill him to avenge his abusive treatment of their fictitious sister and daughter — and she accepted their offer of help to get rid of all evidence after she told them she killed him.
That undercover operation came 10 days after Bartle went to police. Before that, police were treating Mantee’s disappearance as a missing person’s case.
Laroche told the undercover officers she had killed Mantee and stored him in the fridge and freezer for months, and handed over the hammers, saws and knives she had used to kill and then dismember and dispose of him, beginning in March 2020, and finishing six months later.
Court has also heard she was abused by Mantee.
Laroche, in graphic detail, told the two men how she used a hammer to kill Mantee as he slept, according to the audio.
She took them to Neck Point Park, Divers Lake, Pipers Lagoon and Maffeo Sutton Park, popular recreational areas near Nanaimo’s waterfront.
The trial, which is being held in Vancouver and not Nanaimo because there are no holding facilities in Nanaimo for female prisoners, continues on Thursday before Justice Robin Beard, without a jury.
